A Wrinkle in Time and various and sundry tidbits

March 9, 2018

Couple of announcements: My Black Panther review is live on Lightspeed, along with a review by Joseph Allen Hill. A two-fer!

Reminder that tonight at 7 pm MT I’m doing a live Google Hangouts, with a reading and Q&A, so stop on by and ask questions. Here’s the channel.

And I saw A Wrinkle in Time. It’s. . .not very good. I’m not sure I’ve ever been this sad that a movie is not very good. Like, I usually get angry. But this one, I’m just sad. I’m probably not being fair the film — I have a feeling it’s going to change some 10 year old’s life because it’s going to be the exact thing they need to see at the right time. But that’s part of the problem — it feels like it’s aimed at 10 year olds.

To be brief, there’s way too much exposition, the pacing is off, the plot is disconnected, and the emotional core just wasn’t there. It’s very pretty, at least.

I’m doing the group read of Wrinkle in Time on Goodreads and just struggling to get through it. I’d been excited to read it and then go see the movie, but now I’m really not sure what the hype was all about. Oprah? I’ll wait for it on Netflix then…if you don’t like the movie, I’m sure I won’t either.

My parents grew up with A Wrinkle in Time, and they seemed to enjoy the movie, though my mom remarked that some of the visual stuff was overdone.

For my part, I thought it was alright, if fitfully so. Yes, a little squarely aimed at the younger crowd, but often when I say a film is aimed at younger viewers, that usually means said film engages in quite puerile humor, which this movie mercifully doesn’t. In some ways, it felt like this could be to the 2010s generation of kids what The Neverending Story was to the 80s kids.